The
word for compassion has existed since the first language; so has the
temptation
to kill; and it is the struggle between these two capabilities, we
can call them the higher and lower man, that is really the history
of mankind.

We know in our bones that when we kill, we must inevitably pay for
what we have taken. We try to bargain down the consequences or rationalize
the effects by prayer, atonement (i.e., catharsis) ,or animal sacrifice.
Our ultimate bloodletting attempt to restore the social order has been
and continues to be selective human sacrifice.

But when you sow the wind you reap the whirlwind.

We are all familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac; it is in
our annual Rosh
Hashanah Torah portion. Abraham sacrificed his son. That the angel
stayed his
knife-stroke is our later Biblical interpolation to show the end of
human— and the
substitution of animal— sacrifice, or the beginning of conscience.

The real story is between
the lines. As they approach the altar, it is very plain
that Abraham knows exactly how to perform the ritual. He ties Isaac's
hands
and feet and places him on the altar, which already had twigs and firewood
for the
fire. The Bible doesn't say that this is what happened in the past;
but the implication is that Abraham
is the symbol of a changed covenant, where the human sacrifice no longer
has to die.

But human sacrifice has
continued down to our own time, in fact has been brought
to mechanical perfection by modern political weaponry. For an historical
proof we need not look beyond our own Jewish experience where we were
the
sacrifice in massacres, pogroms, and WW II. Substitute in women, black
people, Indians or Chinese in our national American history..

The proximity of violence
is always below the surface of daily American life. Just look around
us and
see murder glorified as catharsis, dominating our popular literature
and
imagination, constantly percolating the subliminal message on the television,
the pulpit,
and especially on the political stage, that might PROTECTS right, or
in other
words that the evil of killing actually restores the social order and
leads
to good.

This contradicts the wisdom
of every religion. We express that wisdom in Judaism with the saying
of Hillel, when he saw a dead soldier floating
down
a river: "You have killed and have been killed, and he that
killed you, he
too will be killed."

Ruling groups have successfuly
instilled the fear that, without sacrificing the blood of humanity,
usually of the innocent
and young,
who most believe in their elders, we cannot have social order. So there
is a
schizophrenic split between our wisdom and this cultivated temptation
to
kill, running loose and unbalanced in the world. It hit very close
to home
last year.

We mourn those innocent
lives, sacrificed when a group of alienated Arabs used murder as
a symbolic religious act to achieve
their
ethnic dignity and revenge. (It is obscure at this moment why so many
things went wrong with our national defense procedures that permitted
this crime.)

Immediately and in turn,
our ruling group stirred sufficient fear and hysteria in a traumatized
population to take revenge in a distant
starving
land, Afghanistan. Neutral observers have estimated 5,000 non-combatants
were killed in
their homes, courtyards, and on roads they ran down trying to escape
a million
to one firepower.

Now, non-combatants is a
euphemism; let us say innocents; and in innocence there is no greater
or lesser. In America and Afghanistan,
skyscrapers and mud huts, all the massacred people were innocent.

And all these actions, the
killing and the vengeance, we know instinctively, are far from any
moral source, because we know what
murder is
and what scapegoating is. By co-incidence, or maybe it isn't co-incidence,
our Yom Kippur service describes scapegoating: placing the burden
of
collective guilt upon a convenient target and condemning it to death.

This is animal sacrifice,
in which the ancients substituted their best unblemished possessions
instead of themselves to clear their sins.
(We won't look into the question of whether we own other nations and
peoples and may
therefore dispose of them as chattel.)

The distinction between
the archetype of Abraham and the modern parable we have just witnessed
remains starkly clear, that Abraham sacrificed
HIS son; Jepthah in Kings 11 sacrificed HIS beloved
daughter, just then coming into womanhood, and the two innocents accepted
death, believing that it would lead to a better world or the survival
of their
community. And that was awful. But we in our time are witnesses to
something
at once more cowardly and more horrible, the sacrifice on two continents
of
thousands of innocent strangers, robbed of their lives and bodies,
robbed of
their names and individualities to maintain an ever more bloody social
order.

And we, the survivors, also
have been robbed, of our human role to fully mourn
the dead and advance the human.

Grief in the collective
psyche is wholesome--it means to reflect and understand, to seek
and apply wisdom, to
put to rest the souls and carry forward the power of the dead, and
of their
death, because the power of death can last a long time in terms of
its impact
on the living.

Much of this human instinct
to grieve has been utilized by the present government, one could
say vulgarized or
blasphemed, for political gain. Any constructive grief we might have
achieved
since our countrymen were immolated has been politically capitalized
into mob revenge,
from which we know there can come no peace and no restoration of the
social
order.

It falls to us to clarify
that human sacrifice is godless and benighted; that
animal sacrifice--and dehumanized humans are degraded to animal sacrifice—
is a sin in
the Hebrew sense of the word--the wrong path; that peace is achievable
by
human means; and that manufactured war spectacles which both excite
and dupe the mass
imagination are living manifestations of fascism parading as patriotism.

It also falls to us to reclaim
rightful grief, and I dare to say that we have fitfully slept every
night and mourned every day since
those atrocities were set in
motion: We speak in our own names now and for the sacrificed innocents,
who
continue to speak with us, though without a voice.

Mankind is fully capable
of dealing with the enormous powers of destruction we have fearfully
created,
and which reverberate as potential within us all. There is no need
to despair or
to look to the future for some solution. We need only be true to the
higher
self. For when we are true, we comfort the dead and inspire the unborn.